Why another cooking blog?

I decided to create this blog as a way for family and friends to see what I'm cooking and to share interesting food related tidbits I come across.
I'm frequently asked for recipes so I thought this would be a good place to start collecting the old, new, and funky recipes that I have.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Cooking for a month.......

I have decided to try something new. I recently decided that I am kind of tired of my evenings being spent in the kitchen and us not eating til 8pm.  I love cooking however sometimes I don't feel like cooking on those nights we end up eating fast food and that my friends is a bad thing when trying to change eating habits.

I have been thinking about buying one of those books fix and forget it or one of the freezer meal books I see all the time. Problem is when I looked at some of the recipes in the books they were all cream of ___ soup and highly processed foods. That does not make for a healthy meal. Then I found this little gem Make Ahead Meals Made Healthy by Michele Borboa. The reviews on Amazon were all pretty good and the few recipes I looked at appeared to be pretty good. So I bought the e-book version.
I am cooking our meals for a month (with the exception of Friday night pizza night) and storing them in our deep freeze. Sounded pretty simple in theory. But here it is August 14th and I still have 4 of the recipes from this book to make. All in all for the first attempt I'd say that isn't bad but I over-ambitiously assumed I could bang all these out in a day or two. Boy was I wrong. So far I've put over 16hrs into cooking. Yikes. However I chalk that up to inefficiency on my part. I've been working one recipe at a time. Next time I am going to cross-reference my recipes looking for ones that use similar ingredients prep all the ingredients for those meals, cook them, and then start all over again. And I will probably prep all my staple ingredients (onions, cheese that needs shredding) ahead of time.

Here's a list of everything that has been or will be cooked....
Whole-grain Pesto Pasta Casserole
Better Than Takeout Asian Beef Strips
Make It A Meal Meatloaf
Asian Pork and 5 Spice Apples
Good for You Mu Shu Pork
Mom's Green Chile Chicken Breasts
Cajun Pasta*
Grilled Ginger Sesame Chicken Breasts
Mushroom Enchiladas
Quick Fix Paella
Asian Spiced Tuna Cakes
Naturally Sweet Agave Glazed Carrots
Fast Fix Zucchini Slaw
Tender Roasted Vegetables
Smashed Garlic Potatoes
Weeknight Stuffed Shells
Beer Can Chicken*
Chicken Stuffed Cannelloni with Roasted Red Pepper Sauce*
Crockpot Thai Chicken*
Spaghetti* - already made
Tacos* - already made
Tater tot casserole*
Dark Chocolate Almond Scones
Lowfat Chocolate Cherry Brownies


*these are not from the book

This isn't even 1/2 of it.....

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